Within the cognitive sciences, cognition tends to be interpreted from an anthropocentric perspective, involving a stringent set of human capabilities. Instead, we suggest that cognition is better explicated as a much more general biological phenomenon, allowing the lower bound of cognition to extend much further down the phylogenetic scale. We argue that elementary forms of cognition can already be witnessed in prokaryotes possessing a functional sensorimotor analogue of the nervous system. Building on a case-study of the Escherichia coli bacterium and its sensorimotor system, the TCST-system, we home in on the characteristics of minimal cognition, and distinguish it from more basic forms of ontogenetic adaptation. On our view, minimal cognition requires an embodiment consisting of a sensorimotor coupling mechanism that subsumes an autopoietic organization; this forms the basis of the growing consensus that the core of cognition revolves around sensorimotor coupling. We discuss the relevance of our interpretation of minimal cognition for the study of cognition in general.

Nervous systems are standardly interpreted as information processing input-output devices. They receive environmental information from their sensors as input, subsequently process or adjust this information, and use the result to control effectors, providing output. Through-conducting activity is here the key organizational feature of nervous systems. In this paper, we argue that this input-output interpretation is not the most fundamental feature of nervous system organization. Building on biological work on the early evolution of nervous systems, we provide an alternative proposal: the skin brain thesis (SBT). The SBT postulates that early nervous systems evolved to organize a new multicellular effector: muscle tissue, the primary source of animal motility. Early nervous systems provided a new way of inducing and coordinating self-organized contractile activity across an extensive muscle surface underneath the skin. The main connectivity in such nervous systems runs across a spread out effector and is transverse to sensor-effector signaling. The SBT therefore constitutes a fundamental conceptual shift in understanding both nervous system operation and what nervous systems are. Nervous systems are foremost spatial organizers that turn large multi-cellular animal bodies into dynamic self-moving units. At the end, we briefly discuss some theoretical connections to central issues within the behavioral, cognitive and neurosciences.

The premise of this two-part theme issue is simple: the cognitive sciences should join the rest of the life sciences in how they approach the quarry within their research domain. Specifically, understanding how organisms on the lower branches of the phylogenetic tree become familiar with, value and exploit elements of an ecological niche while avoiding harm can be expected to aid understanding of how organisms that evolved later (including Homo sapiens ) do the same or similar things. We call this approach basal cognition. In this introductory essay, we explain what the approach involves. Because no definition of cognition exists that reflects its biological basis, we advance a working definition that can be operationalized; introduce a behaviour-generating toolkit of capacities that comprise the function (e.g. sensing/perception, memory, valence, learning, decision making, communication), each element of which can be studied relatively independently; and identify a (necessarily incomplete) suite of common biophysical mechanisms found throughout the domains of life involved in implementing the toolkit. The articles in this collection illuminate different aspects of basal cognition across different forms of biological organization, from prokaryotes and single-celled eukaryotes—the focus of Part 1—to plants and finally to animals, without and with nervous systems, the focus of Part 2. By showcasing work in diverse, currently disconnected fields, we hope to sketch the outline of a new multidisciplinary approach for comprehending cognition, arguably the most fascinating and hard-to-fathom evolved function on this planet. Doing so has the potential to shed light on problems in a wide variety of research domains, including microbiology, immunology, zoology, biophysics, botany, developmental biology, neurobiology/science, regenerative medicine, computational biology, artificial life and synthetic bioengineering. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Basal cognition: conceptual tools and the view from the single cell’.

It remains a standing problem how and why the first nervous systems evolved. Molecular and genomic information is now rapidly accumulating but the macroscopic organization and functioning of early nervous systems remains unclear. To explore potential evolutionary options, a coordination centered view is discussed that diverges from a standard input–output view on early nervous systems. The scenario involved, the skin brain thesis (SBT), stresses the need to coordinate muscle-based motility at a very early stage. This paper addresses how this scenario with its focus on coordination also deals with sensory aspects. It will be argued that the neural structure required to coordinate extensive sheets of contractile tissue for motility provides the starting point for a new multicellular organized form of sensing. Moving a body by muscle contraction provides the basis for a multicellular organization that is sensitive to external surface structure at the scale of the animal body. Instead of thinking about early nervous systems as being connected to the environment merely through input and output, the implication developed here is that early nervous systems provide the foundation for a highly specific animal sensorimotor organization in which neural activity directly reflects bodily and environmental spatiotemporal structure. While the SBT diverges from the input–output view, it is closely linked to and supported by ongoing work on embodied approaches to intelligence to which it adds a new interpretation of animal embodiment and sensorimotor organization.

The origin of nervous systems has traditionally been discussed within two conceptual frameworks. Input -output models stress the sensory-motor aspects of nervous systems, while internal coordination models emphasize the role of nervous systems in coordinating multicellular activity, especially muscle-based motility. Here we consider both frameworks and apply them to describe aspects of each of three main groups of phenomena that nervous systems control: behaviour, physiology and development. We argue that both frameworks and all three aspects of nervous system function need to be considered for a comprehensive discussion of nervous system origins. This broad mapping of the option space enables an overview of the many influences and constraints that may have played a role in the evolution of the first nervous systems.